The present invention relates to a diagnostic tool and diagnostic method for determining an interruption in a plant with at least one device.
The following discussion of related art is provided to assist the reader in understanding the advantages of the invention, and is not to be construed as an admission that this related art is prior art to this invention.
The plant status indicates the status of the machine/plant as a whole (from a customer's point of view). The plant status can include e.g. the utilization time, idle time, interruption, maintenance, servicing etc. as explained for instance in OMAC, “Organization for Machine Automation and Control”. Moreover, the plant status can also include the device status.
Interruptions can therefore occur in the devices and in the plant status. A categorization of the interruption, according to an interruption due to maintenance or during operation is only possible with considerable manual effort.
Machine or plant statuses are typically monitored by measuring suitable parameters. The term ‘condition monitoring’ for increasing safety and plant efficiency is used here. To this end devices are on the one hand equipped with various sensors, which measure or record suitable parameters such as e.g. oscillations of the devices.
The term devices refer to devices which are arranged directly on/in the plant, and which are also sometimes referred to below simply as devices. Automation devices moreover have monitoring functions in order to detect external interruptions, e.g. short-circuit, wire break, overcurrent etc. or in order to detect internal interruptions, e.g. programming errors, memory overflows etc.
Detected interruptions of the devices, i.e. the device status, are reported to higher-level systems, e.g. PLC, HMI or other software. These reports provide an overview of the status of the individual automation components.
It would be desirable and advantageous to provide a less complicated diagnostic tool and a method for simple determination of an interruption in a plant.